Custom 404 for selected URL without ErrorDocument-CodePudding

I am trying to display custom 404 page for the documents or folder or file or link which may or may not exist but i still want to show a message of 404 to visitor for some purpose.

I have checked Setting a custom 404 page for a specific URL in htaccess and Setting a custom 404 page for a specific URL in htaccess

Code :

RewriteRule ^foo.html$ /spoof404.txt [L,R=404,NC]
RewriteRule ^hello$ /spoof404.txt [L,R=404,NC]
RewriteRule ^file/example.php$ /spoof404.txt [L,R=404,NC]

With these code, i am successfully getting 404 Status in header but it not displaying the contents of spoof404.txt

Note:

I am not looking for Errordocument like 404 or 403
I am not looking for redirect
This is not a duplicate questions. i have already searched other part of stackoverflow before asking here.

CodePudding user response：

I am not looking for Errordocument like 404 or 403

Why not? That is exactly how you do this. There is no other way on Apache-only (without using another server-side script) to trigger a 404 HTTP status and serve a custom response.

For example:

ErrorDocument 404 /spoof404.txt

RewriteRule ^foo\.html$ - [NC,R=404]
RewriteRule ^hello$ - [NC,R=404]
RewriteRule ^file/example\.php$ - [NC,R=404]

When you request /foo.html it will trigger a 404 and /spoof404.txt will be served.

When specifying a status ode outside of the 3xx range, the substituion string is ignored (hence the use of a single - - hyphen). In this case, the L flag is also superfluous, since it is implied when specifying a non-3xx R code.

UPDATE:

how to block with parameters like example.com/something.php?something=tokens&othertoken=token

The RewriteRule directive matches against the URL-path only, to match the query string (everything after the first ?) then you need an additional condition (RewriteCond directive) and check against the QUERY_STRING server variable.

For example, to match that exact URL (although case-insensitively) and trigger a 404:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^something=tokens&othertoken=token$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^something\.php$ - [NC,R=404]